From the vantage point of the depa office you can see local government at its worst. Sometimes petty and venal, sometimes punctuated by self-interest and neglect of the community and the environment, sometimes backward-looking and ignoring of the future, sometimes a bit dull and predictable, and sometimes also cringe-worthy and embarrassing in its stupidity.

The point of Robbo’s Pearls is to vent. We contemplated Robbo’s Rave but that was too limiting. It’s a blog (apparently) and like all blogs it’s meant to be immediate and all about sharing.

So while we see the worst, we also see the best and we see the tier of Government closest to the community and the tier that in many ways is the one more people rely upon and have higher expectations about.

Even though there are few pleasures to rival nailing some stupid GM or HR manager’s decision in the Industrial Relations Commission, or even the absolute joy of nailing a conga line of incompetents like that at Gosford and reported last month, it’s hard not to also feel defensive about the industry. You know, the reluctance to wheel in yet another embarrassing decision that makes the industry look bad because some bloke decided to bite a dog.

So we hope Canterbury wakes up to itself and recognizes that simple inoffensive words to describe people doesn’t come within a bull’s roar of constituting a breach of the Code of Conduct and that their insistence that they do can only end in tears.

And that neither does using strong language in a training course for employees who are going to get abused in the foulest and most offensive ways imaginable on the job because it’s better to know what to expect and how to deal with it. Particularly where the content of the course is known to management, has been “discussed with our training officer who has supported the training initiative”, has been provided to other councils for a fee, has run without complaint for more than a decade and runs alongside CARM training that also has challenging and confronting role plays where strong language is an integral part.

I can imagine whoever is allocated the dispute, if Canterbury doesn’t wake up to itself, scratching their head and wondering about the folly of the human condition and the negative portrayal of the industry in things like Grass Roots and Rats in the Ranks.

Come on Canterbury, jolly well wake up you (a string of physically descriptive words has been deleted to protect the over-sensitive).